Linda Perry was five months into filming a documentary when her life was thrown into turmoil. She hadn’t exactly planned to make a film about herself: the frontwoman of 4 Non Blondes and hugely successful songwriter to the stars (Pink, Christina Aguilera, Courtney Love, Adele) had merely agreed to let her friend record some studio footage for social media content. “He just said, ‘Can I come and film you and your process of songwriting?” Perry says. “But then things started happening.”
That’s an uncharacteristic understatement. Towards the end of 2022, Perry was diagnosed with breast cancer. Shortly afterwards, her mother, who had dementia, became gravely ill and died four months later, just as Perry was recovering from a double mastectomy. “And then my meltdown,” Perry adds, referencing an all-consuming artistic and personal identity crisis. “It was a crazy year.” The friend who was filming – Don Hardy, a producer – “saw a clear documentary where I was lost and in my own spin out”.
The situation was made even more fraught given Perry’s family history. Her mum had abused her as a child, which Perry describes as “fully traumatic and dramatic and abusive emotionally, mentally, physically”. So inadvertently, Hardy’s film, Let it Die Here – which has inspired Perry’s solo album of the same name, her first in 27 years – became a moving, raw, unfiltered document of grief, suffering, survival and resolution. “If the documentary was about me and my vanity and how amazing I am, I would never have let that happen,” she says. “But it’s about way more than just me. It’s so honest and real.”
Perry, on video call from LA, is one of America’s great songwriters. 4 Non Blondes only released one album at the height of America’s alt-rock explosion – 1992’s Bigger, Better, Faster, More! – but it had huge influence. With feminist and queer empowerment to the fore – Perry performed on Letterman with a guitar that had the words “dyke” and “choice” written on it – the album sold seven million copies, spawned the MTV mega anthem “What’s Up?” and made Perry an icon.
Not that she makes a virtue of identity. “Let me just make this as clear, or queer, as possible. Me being gay has nothing to do with anything. But if you want to go there, I’m a single mum, gay Latino woman.” She laughs. “I mean, I got a lot of stuff on me right there.”
Linda Perry’s band 4 Non Blondes released only one album in 1992, but another will be released after the band reformed last year (Photo: Paul Natkin/Getty)Perry says “What’s Up?” will never be beaten in terms of its impact. “Have I written songs that I feel are better? Yeah, of course. But it doesn’t mean it’s going to be received better.” Yet her run of hits in the noughties, where she became the go-to songwriter for pop stars seeking an alternative edge, ran it close: “Get the Party Started” by Pink, Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?” and, perhaps best of all, Aguilera’s ballad “Beautiful”. There’ve been Grammy nominations and in 2015 an induction to the Songwriters Hall of Fame; and this week Perry received the Special International Award at the Ivor Novello Awards.
It’s not just her musical abilities that make her such a respected figure: Perry is admired for her no-nonsense independent spirit. “I mean, I’m a badass. I’m powerful. I know that. My mom was very, very tough. So I’m tough.” When I say lots of women in the music industry can often feel undermined and undervalued, Perry gives it short shrift. “I consider that a weak way to look at things. I’m not undermined, and I’m not undervalued at all. I’m actually feared. Men are very intimidated by me when I walk into a room. My energy enters a room way before I do.”
Which is precisely what makes seeing her in such distress in the documentary all the more moving. Vulnerability is there in Perry’s songs – “honestly, most of my power comes from me being insecure and vulnerable” – but she says at times the documentary was difficult for her to watch. She is shown in her studio post-surgery, and, at the end, in tears after she performed “What Lies With You”, an anthemic song about her mum: she wrote the music the night before filming, and the lyrics that morning (“I’m holding on cos I just can’t say goodbye/I saw heaven in her eyes”). “It’s so powerful to me what happened in that room in such a short period of time.”
One distressing scene sees Perry go to film herself on her laptop to promote her EqualizeHER project (to help women access careers in music). But then a Supertramp song comes on through the speakers, the childhood memory sparking a breakdown: Perry continues to dance while in floods of tears, talking inaudibly. “I don’t know what happened. All I know is that I had some sort of meltdown.” She sent the video to Hardy immediately, who had asked Perry to also shoot footage for the film. “When I saw that on the big screen, I almost went into shock. It was a blackout of emotions, and seeing that scene was so embarrassing and so ridiculously honest and vulnerable.”
Linda Perry performing in New York City earlier this year at a Love Rocks NYC benefit concert (Photo: Taylor Hill/Getty)In another scene, the question of her purpose in life – as both a woman and artist – completely overwhelms her. She tells me that years of absorbing other artists’ personalities, feelings, ways of working – “if you’re wearing a jean and T-shirt, I put on your jean and T-shirt” is how she puts it – has adjusted her sense of self. “I’m a workaholic. And my mind is spinning. My heart is spinning. Everything’s spinning. Within that you get buried in all this other stuff that it gets hard to find out – where are you in this picture?”
The backdrop to this is childhood trauma. When she was growing up in San Diego – before she found an escape through music, via going to live with her older brother – Perry tried to kill herself with tranquilisers. She was 16. When the doctor told her mum and recommended treatment, she ignored the advice and did nothing.
Throughout the documentary, Perry seemed torn between denouncing such actions and seeking validation from her mother that had never come. “Yeah,” she agrees, “and I think that would be one of the things that I hope people can relate to. That relationship with your parents is very complex. My mum being a hard woman wasn’t really her fault. Her parents were hard on her. I mean, I couldn’t give a f**k about my dad. I loved him and whatever, but his mistakes were his, and I was invisible to him. But my mum, I admired. She’s so powerful and strong, and what a survivor. And I wouldn’t trade any of that hard living for anything. I would take the beatings all again to end up where I am today.”
She says her mum’s death doesn’t change her perspective at all. “She did all those things, you know? So it doesn’t take it away just because someone dies. I still feel the bruises from that.” But there was a happier ending. Perry was able to bond with her mum over the last four months of her life; she lived in Perry’s house, and they slept in beds next to each other as she acted as her carer. It was, says Perry, “the most incredibly beautiful thing that could have ever happened. I got closure. So many people don’t get that. This is a hard thing to say, but my mother dying was the best gift she ever gave me. Because I’m free.”
But that freedom brings its own issues, she says. “Who am I without the villain in this picture? Who am I without someone to fight? Who am I without someone to blame? Who am I? I’m battling myself now. But it’s definitely way lighter, I’ll tell you that.”
Perry with Rhodes, her daughter with ex-wife Sara (Photo: Ella Hovsepian/Getty)The album Let It Die Here tries to answer all those questions across 17 tracks. Like the documentary, it is a powerful, at times uncomfortable listen. She describes it as “long, dark and depressing, and so thoughtful and emotional”. It is designed to lay the ghosts of the past to rest. “The goal of the album is to let it die here, let all that shit go so you can move forward.”
It holds all of Perry’s conflicted emotions, sometimes, as on “Is That All You Got” and “I Am Daughter”, within the same song. “It’s as if this record is a split personality and they’re all just showing up without my acknowledgement.” With “Feathers on a Storm”, she is taking responsibility for her future happiness. “We need to stop trying to make other people change, and we have to find the change within ourselves.”
A Perry solo album has been a long time coming. Why? “Because I’m scared,” she says, which is a surprising answer. “I’m a sensitive person. I’m a big contradiction.” She says it’s been fun, but she’s been using the artists she’s worked with as a shield. “I’ve been hiding behind people.” But increasingly she wanted more. “I was getting bored of being a producer.”
Last year Perry reformed 4 Non Blondes; “What’s Up?” is so enduring it recently soundtracked a viral TikTok lip-sync craze. Perry says the sentiment is eternal. “What is happening with the world today, like what the f**k is going on? There’s always some jackass f**king something up.” Perry has written a new 4 Non Blondes record, a “90s rock, dumb and fun” album she is excited about, due next year.
She seems to be enjoying taking centre stage again. At the end of the documentary, her ex-wife, the actor Sara Gilbert, says that she hopes from now on Perry is able to “make her art with more joy and less suffering”.
“Yeah, totally,” says Perry. “And since my mum passed away, I do feel like I’m a little more at peace and not having to make things so hard. There is an easiness that’s happening that I can receive. It’s like, ‘Oh, I get it now.’”
The album ‘Let It Die Here’ is out now. The documentary ‘Let It Die Here’ will be screening at Olympic Studios, London, on 21 June
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